We’ve Heard It All Before; LAPD Mystery Remains

Cops. Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em.

What’s a city to do?

On Wednesday, a dozen Los Angeles jurors convicted three Los Angeles police officers of conspiracy and sundry misdeeds, each felony branded somewhere or another with “Rampart.”

There’s one shoe dropping--boom.

The next day, the second shoe--spit-shined, heavy-duty, regulation-sole--fell.

Another report about the Los Angeles Police Department landing on the city’s doorstep: 220 pages, 12,000 hours of work, hundreds of interviews--a lot more of the same, more meticulously documented:

The department is stuck in the La Brea Tar Pits of policing. The brass blames the grunts, the grunts blame the brass, they all blame the politicians, and the city they protect and serve is sick and tired of the lot of them.

“Arbitrary, hostile, confrontational, rigid, lax, haphazard” are a few of the adjectives gleaned from this latest report. If we were all married, these modifiers would translate into, “He never talks to me, she never listens to me.” What am I saying? If we were all married, we’d be divvying up the community property right now.

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Forgive me--it may be Florida fatigue--if I don’t rouse myself to applaud or even to hiss this estimable report.

It is the work of nearly 200 civic worthies donating big dollops of their time and their power chits.

But it is at least the third report on the LAPD this year alone, and almost every problem in every one of them seems to come down to the single question nobody can answer, the one that maybe nobody wants to:

Who is in charge here?

With the LAPD--virtually the only civic institution that regularly touches the lives of every Angeleno--we have a balance of power so carefully structured that no one looks to be in charge. Do we calculate a dysfunctional police culture as the price of full jails and safe streets? Do we tolerate the entropy of a bad civic marriage rather than an even worse divorce?

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If I am loath to sit down and read all 220 pages of this new report, it’s not for want of interest. It’s engrossing to find out that most of more than 2,000 officers surveyed think “The community benefits when officers report the misconduct of officers,” but paradoxically tend to disagree that “I benefit, personally, when officers report the misconduct of other officers.” And why is that? Couldn’t be a “code of silence,” because questions 40 and 60 shows that they strongly disagree that such a code exists.

So there’s rich stuff for the reading in this report. It’s just we have heard it and heard it and heard it. Think Washington has gridlock? Gauged against the pace of change in the LAPD and the city that nominally runs it, Washington moves at warp speed.

Let me tell you who will be reading this report, and reading it most attentively--the Justice Department.

With its consent decree to monitor how the LAPD does its business all signed and sealed, the Justice Department is the newest and maybe the biggest player in the old paper-scissors-rock game: consent decree covers badge.

To the Justice Department, the LAPD is like someone who’s committed a first-time offense and who is put on probation. And the Justice Department is the probation officer, checking on how the LAPD keeps to the new rules that will be tacked on the door of every station house. Keep your nose clean. Straighten up and fly right. Tidy up your act. Or, pal, you won’t know what hit you until they cut it out of your scalp.

As three former LAPD police officers and the rest of the city learned Wednesday in a downtown courtroom, if reform--in attitude, in tactics, in morale, in thinking--if it doesn’t happen on the front end, in the streets and the police stations, then it will happen on the back end, in the courtrooms--sure as shooting.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail is patt.morrison@latimes.com